Moving into the bargaining phase - our history against other B1G opponents

Moving into the bargaining phase - our history against other B1G opponents

Like a lot of people, I don't have a big problem with Maryland or Rutgers per se; I just dislike having 14 teams because that means having two more league opponents that we won't play in any given year (unless we expand the conference schedule, which I'd really like to see). But I was thinking about this when I saw what our all-time record against Iowa was (41-13-4) - a school with whom we have shared a conference for a century. It turns out that the custom of playing everyone, or just about everyone, in the conference is actually not that old. Here are our all-time series against B1G opponents:

Ohio: 58-44-6 (108 meetings)

MSU: 68-32-5 (105 meetings)

Minnesota: 72-24-3 (99 meetings)

Illinois: 69-23-2 (94 meetings)

Northwestern: 53-15-2 (71 meetings)

Wisconsin: 49-14-1 (64 meetings)

Indiana: 52-9 (61 meetings)

Purdue: 44-14 (58 meetings)

Iowa: 41-13-4 (58 meetings)

PSU: 10-6 (16 meetings)

Nebraska: 4-3-1 (eight meetings)

So it seems that historically, there have only been four teams we've played on a truly annual basis: Ohio, MSU, Minnesota and Illinois (I guess that's why they consider us a rival). That makes sense when you consider that for a long time, the football season was only eight or nine games long, and not all of those were league games. Most of our games against schools like Wisconsin, Indiana and Purdue must have occurred in the last 30 years or so, when we started playing near-round robin schedules. Before then it was almost like they weren't in our conference. This is the direction in which we are going now. Is it ideal? No, but we have been there before.

I was in 2nd grade for our last loss to Indiana. Surprisingly, that was not an upset. They were ranked 15th and we were 20th. We still would have won but IU blocked a punt for a TD in the 4th quarter to pull out a 14-10 win.

I won't embed highlights of that one for obvious reasons. So instead, I'll show that IU squad beating up on OSU in Columbus...

"wolverinehistorian, for someone so dedicated and seemingly level headed, his grudges are monumental." ~ triangle_M

You just regurgitated our all time record against teams when you could have brought up some interesting points in this post.

For example, MSU joined the big ten in 1953, so we've played them a heck of a lot outside of the big ten. This isn't terribly relevant to adding teams, but it is a start.

Or maybe you could have mentioned Wisconsin, Purdue, Northwestern, Illinois, and Minnesota were all founding big ten members along with us (and U of Chicago). We have been playing Wisconsin, Indiana and Purdue for a long long time now.

A little bit of analysis and you could make the statement that the issue of un-even schedules within the big ten is not a 2012 issue. It has been going on since the start of the league.

Are you a park ranger at Yellowstone? Say hi to Yogi Bear for me. - the_big_house 500th

To provide some granularity to how scheduling has gone over time, here is the number of times we've played each team (including our newest members) by decade - it is interesting to see the distribution change with scheduling sensibilities through the years. The thumbnail to the chart is below:

"Funny isn't it, how naughty dentists always make that one fatal mistake."